Lecture/Book Talk by Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano: Occasions for Poetry: Politics, Literature, and Imagination Among the Early Modern Ottomans
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Join us for a compelling lecture by Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano on how Turkish poetry emerged as the preferred medium for communicating, debating, and shaping political and social experiences in the early Ottoman Empire. After the conquest of Constantinople in 1453, Ottoman elites turned to poetry to craft distinctive expressions of identity and authority within the sultanate. Aguirre-Mandujano places Ottoman court poetry in its historical and social context, revealing its role as a powerful political act. Through poetic imagery, scholars and bureaucrats not only engaged with one another but also influenced bureaucratic practices and advanced their careers. Far more than artistic expression, poetry became a tool to shape social realities, define literary traditions, and mold the framework of imperial politics and power—an influence that persisted for nearly six centuries.
Oscar Aguirre-Mandujano studies early modern Ottoman intellectual history, and its connections to literature, poetry, and bureaucracy. Aguirre-Mandujano first monograph, Occasions for Poetry: Politics, Literature and Imagination Among the Early Modern Ottomans (forthcoming with Penn Press, March 2025) examines the relation between literary composition and the transformation of political thought in the early modern Islamic world and Europe. Occasions for Poetry shows that in the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries Ottoman scholars and statesmen produced a new literary language in order to express political thought. Occasions for Poetry posits that literary production at the imperial court crafted distinctive modes of expression in order to articulate the Ottoman sultanate’s place in the world, particularly vis-à-vis its imperial rivals in Europe and the Islamic world.
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